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Friday, December 26, 2014

Flight MH370: ‘I just keep hoping he’ll come home’

Jacquita Gonzales

Nine months after the Malysian Airlines flight disappeared, the family of its chief steward are still waiting for answers

There is no Christmas tree this year at the Gomes residence in Kuala Lumpur, no lights, and no big celebration over the holiday season; there’s nothing to celebrate. Jacquita Gonzales’ husband is still missing.
“Usually Patrick is on leave from 22 December up until new year, so he would be home for almost two weeks,” she says of her childhood sweetheart, Patrick Gomes, the lead steward on Malaysia Airlines flight MH370, which disappeared on 8 March en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing.
“I keep thinking of the Christmas carol I’ll Be Home for Christmas, and I just keep hoping he’ll be home. But because he’s not around, it’s very difficult.”
The couple met when she was 12 and married when she was 22. She recently celebrated his 55th birthday without him. Life without Gomes over the past nine months has been an emotional rollercoaster, she says, beginning with the way she learned her husband’s flight had simply vanished from radar screens: a friend watching CNN phoned her with the news the next morning.
Since then there’s been little more than speculation, conspiracy theories and titbits of tangible information about what really happened that fateful spring morning, when MH370 disappeared with all 239 people on board.
Analysis of satellite “pings” emitted by the plane saw investigators conclude thatit probably crashed somewhere in the Indian Ocean, but search teams have yet to turn up any evidence. Australia’s Transportation Safety Bureau has been leading a deep-sea search for the plane over a 55,000 sq km priority area, much of which is 6,000 metres below the sea’s surface.
Without any wreckage, evidence or viable cause for the crash, Gonzales and her four children – three daughters aged 29, 27 and 25, and a son, 15 – have been left bewildered and traumatised. They keep the house in order in hope of Gomes’s return – a hope that still exists amidst the uncertainty and fear that surrounds his disappearance.
His flight uniform is in a basket, waiting to be ironed, his shoes and slippers just outside the door.
“Nothing has changed,” says Gonzales. “When we talk or grumble [with one another] we still say, ‘Just wait til your father gets back, he’s going to be so upset with you.’” She laughs quietly. “We try to keep things comfortable so that when he comes back he can relax.”
Gonzales says she reads everything about what may have happened to the plane: theories it was hijacked, or laden with lithium-ion batteries that exploded, or otherwise succumbed to foul play. But none of it provides any lasting peace, because none of the answers are final.
“Sometimes the speculations [seem] so real that you go, ‘OK, there’s a chance everything’s going to be OK.’ And then something else comes along and you’re just falling flat again,” she says.
“You just try to keep busy every day so you don’t just think and think and think … [Then] you’ll be driving in the car and suddenly your mind wanders and you just start crying.”
Gonzales rejected the airline’s offer of therapy and initially sought consolation from other, equally bewildered, MH370 crew families, with whom she still shares stories and tears. Then, in July, after flight MH17 was believed to have been shot down in Ukraine en route from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur, Gonzales began offering her own counselling to the bereaved family members of those on board – an effort, she says, that could only be borne by those who knew exactly what they were going through.
“They seem pretty OK,” Gonzales says of the MH17 victims’ relatives to whom she reached out. “They have had closure already and I think they are just moving on. Now it’s about finding out who shot the plane down, as most of the [other] stuff has already been settled.”
She goes quiet, her sadness tinged perhaps with understandable envy for the answers she wishes she had.
Like her, many other relatives of those on board MH370 are also waiting for their loved ones to come home. Most have refused the airline’s initial compensation offer of $50,000 (£32,100) provided to next of kin, according to Malaysia’s transport minister.
“We have extended the initial compensation of $50,000 to the family members but unfortunately many still do not want to receive it because they still consider their family members are still alive as we have yet to find any aircraft or bodies from the MH370 tragedy.”
It has been a bad year for Malaysia Airlines: first MH370, then MH17; massive job cuts; an insensitively titled ticket contest named “My Ultimate Bucket List”; a steward charged with sexually assaulting a passenger; and ultimately its expected delisting and $2bn restructuring. But the worst for Gonzales – who was herself a flight attendant – was the chief executive’s statement that MH370 would be officially declared “lost” by the year end to expedite insurance claims for the bereaved.
“How can you [force] closure?” she asks, incredulous. “That doesn’t mean that everything is just over – we are still around, we are still waiting. I don’t think we will ever let them close [things] until we have an answer to where the plane is.”
Her daughters avoid the news. They are waiting for tangible answers before they make any conclusions about their father’s fate. But Gonzales knows her son is suffering. His room is scattered with old photographs taken from family and wedding albums, though he keeps his anguish quiet. The most important thing, she says, is to keep the conversation going, whether it’s at home or in the public eye – so that no one forgets that the mystery still hasn’t been solved.
“There are still 239 lives that are out there missing, we need people to keep asking questions and keeping it alive so that the [search team] who are helping with the search know that we are still waiting,” she says. “It’s not a waste of their time to be out there looking in the Indian Ocean, so far away from their own families. We really, really appreciate it.”

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